


As I die (Reaping through the truth, Life becomes untrue)

by elizaria



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-07
Updated: 2009-09-07
Packaged: 2019-06-21 05:09:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15550314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizaria/pseuds/elizaria
Summary: Torchwood's Children of the Earth. I finally saw it. Figured I'd hit it after a weekend of having my BFF here so I had some good mood to walk me through it. Oh yeah. Crying like a fangirl who got her heart ripped out in a good way. So much to do my head in and I won't say more cause I don't know how except fic. As therapy. And not very happy therapy at that. I want fluff, except for some reason TW never fits my fluff part of my brain.Title: As I die (Reaping through the truth, Life becomes untrue)Pairings: canon Jack/Ianto, mentioning Jack/HartRating: R?Wordcount: 2247 wordsNotes: unbeta'd as always, all comments welcomed. Title borrowed from Paradise Lost (music group, not book). Unapologetic love for Jack, Gwen and all Torchwood team.Excerpt: Jack couldn't remember for the longest time if he actually slept while still having someone in his bed. He was a skilled fake sleeper, so he could watch his bed partners with their faces unguarded and their secrets spilled out over his sheets. The way they'd twitch, moan and twist when the dreams came tiptoeing. He was intrigued by it, because Jack wondered if he dreamed like them even if he didn't remember it.





	As I die (Reaping through the truth, Life becomes untrue)

People dream. That's just how things are, how the human brain works through things even as the body gets the rest it needs. Most nights Jack was sure his brain had given up on the dreaming. That millennia of life and never living in the past had made his brain stop bothering with it, that his quest to only be surface ready to meet each new day as a blank slate had quelled the need for dreamscapes. He never did sleep much anyways, this forever body of his seemed to have changed the parameters of how much sleep was needed. So the few hours he  _did_  sleep was nothing but complete shutdown. Dreamless, deep and empty.  
  
Jack couldn't remember for the longest time if he actually slept while still having someone in his bed. He was a skilled fake sleeper, so he could watch his bed partners with their faces unguarded and their secrets spilled out over his sheets. The way they'd twitch, moan and twist when the dreams came tiptoeing. He was intrigued by it, because Jack wondered if he dreamed like them even if he didn't remember it. He seldom kept anyone around long or close enough to ask. Fellow Captain Hart though, he'd been around long enough but they'd been alike when it came to sleeping. Guarded even as their bodies had shared each other's every physical secret there was to know. The sounds of their bodies meeting, the texture of their skin, inside and out. How they'd sweat and shiver and sink into each other, wet, hot and deep.  
  
But when they'd slept, as close as they were apart. Curled up together or in separate rooms - they didn't watch each other like that. Some similar notion of invasion of privacy, that they'd shared so much this was to be kept apart. Or maybe another lie they shared between them.  
  
There'd been no one till Ianto, whom Jack definitely didn't let himself sleep around for the first year. Never knowing if he'd try to kill Jack in his sleep even as Jack knew of his own immortality. His edge of forever had altered his fear of sleeping, shaved off some of the worries, but he'd learned the hard way that there are worse things than dying.  
  
But Ianto had grown on him, the way he used Jack to fill up the empty spaces and take out his grief fuelled by hatred and hot slippery angry sex. The stiff upper-lip boy who timed Jack's performance, demanded satisfaction and begged to be hurt just a little bit more. So he could curse Jack to hell, bitten lips and even tone, tell him to go harder and deeper even as he sneered at him. Who sounded like he was meeting the Queen at high tea even as he fucked himself harder on Jack's cock, his tie barely out of place. Who evolved into something precious, carving out a place Jack was surprised to found he'd given away. No nonsense attitude matched with high expectations, and Jack's own fear to fail them wasn't new but the way Ianto used it was. Pushing against Jack's surfaces to dig deep under and pull things with him. Up and into the light and suddenly there's a warmth curling in Jack's chest whenever he looks at Ianto, even as Jack kisses him and teases him and wishes he could lock them up safely forever so Jack would get to have this. To hold and touch and feel that lanky body stretch over him and sleep in abandon. Trust so implicitly even when he really shouldn't and Jack's not sure how to hold it and care for that trust without dropping the ball and breaking it into something irreparable. Something torn and stained by his touch. Like so many things Jack's been around, they start out fresh and if lucky are only worn around the edges when returned. But usually they're dead and gone, pieces of a puzzle you can never put back together. Gray, Estelle, Suzie, Owen, Tosh are only the latest.  
  
But there are warm arms to distract him from the nightmares, from dirt filling his mouth, from Grey laughing his revenge and Hart's eyes like broken glass. This is the worst death yet.  
  
Then.  
  
  
* * *  
  
  
But apparently blank slating his entire life with loosing just about everyone that tethered Jack to this world have changed his dreams. They've come awake like cinema reels of bittersweet memories that twist into nothing but pain. The nightmares are helped by recriminations, that maybe if Jack had tried harder to remember his past he'd have figured it out sooner. But that's the story of being eternal, everything comes back to you in the end. Grey was a child's nightmare in the back of his head, a guilt so interwoven with what he'd become that it was part of every fiber of his being. You couldn't tangle them apart but Jack had never expected to meet it head on, see it's face and die slowly (over and over again) by it. By him. Gray. A nightmare broken free to exact a vengeance he had imagined on himself more than once.  
  
Jack had guilt and regrets by the buckets, compartmentalized in the vast library of living forever and filed under failures and recriminations. Of things done and sacrifices to be met. Sometimes the dreams took a route by that library and picked things by random, making him wake with the memories clawing through him and Jack expecting his skin to bleed just like it did on the reel playing out on the inside of his eyelids.  
  
Being dreamless for long enough leaves you vulnerable when the dreams come back. It felt brand new these nightly horrors, burning Jack's eyes and leaving a hollow and empty ache inside his chest. Waking up alone, even when he wasn't, because the limbs beside him were never the right ones.  
  
He has many deaths yet to experience, and didn't know then how much worse things could get. Just a mere two days before the closest years to come and the plans he had for them have all been deleted. He always knew he'd survive Ianto but he hadn't expected it to be  _now_. He thought he had more time. He should have known. He really should have. So he relives this memory. The last time he gets to hold Ianto and feel his pulse echo against his own without feeling it stutter, slow and quiet.  
  
  
Beans be damned, Jack finds them a quiet corner and dark shadows and he kisses Ianto like he wishes he could drown in him. Hurts him with teeth and tongue, lips harsh and demanding but Ianto opens up and lets Jack have it all. Tastes his desperation and turns it into something calmer, Ianto's hands holding Jack's lungs, his heart, his bones together and finally the heat seeps through and Jack no longer feel like he's exploding. Again. Into burning pieces that screams to form again, to be like quicksilver and recreate. To yearn to form into a living breathing thing, slowly as the nerves come alive. Naked under the glaring light-bulb, skinless and it's like imagining being born into a vat of acid. The air itself is drying his tissues, stretching tighter as the cells slowly reform. Piece by piece and his vocal cords are enough to let his screams be heard now. To pull through the metamorphosis and only get concrete as a gift on the other side, wet heavy slow choking death. To hold your lips and eyes tight, tighter and make sure none of it gets inside you. To choke with it clasped around you like a wet glove, a hood of stone and a weight of twelve children given away to the aliens. Proper punishment one might think. All Jack can think is dying like this is not so different than being buried alive, except it's worse and he wonders in horror how long he will be trapped like this. His body is reduced to neurons firing in his brain, trying to kick-start his system but he never finds enough oxygen to come alive. But in his darkest nightmares he imagines he remembers this even though it's impossible.  
  
His lips can still feel the concrete tightening around him as it dries, before everything is made into stone and he'll be gone again. Into the black where the darkness awaits him, shadows stretching after him and always running in tar, slow like molasses.  
  
So Jack softens his kisses to breathe in the air easy and all around them, buries his face in Ianto's neck and draws deep breaths of his scent. New clothes rather than his detergent of choice, not smelling enough coffee and himself like he usually do. But Ianto's chest expands into Jack's hands, Ianto's heart beating with a pulse against his lips and it's a comfort in this. To let himself close his eyes and bury himself in the sensations for a second or two, let them have this and rest in each other.  
  
  
* * *  
  
  
It doesn't last very long unfortunately. Like so many other things it falls apart in his hands, like going cold and lifeless and breaking into dust. This life is forfeit. He's done with this.  
  
These past days have garnered him a lifetime of regrets, destroyed so much in one fell swoop. Watching his grandchild, no... sacrificing his grandchild while feeling the screams of his daughter echo through his ribcage. Sometimes not everything can be put down as means to an end, to save them all you give one away for free. He'd been ready to be the one doing all the sacrificing, he'd been ready to stop the carousel and get off for real this time. Maybe there was a crazy wish in all of this that he himself would be enough, but instead it was those closest to him that yet again paid for it while he was standing around. Like a goddamn cockroach, crawling over dead bodies just because it was designed to withstand.  
  
Except there was no goal anymore, nothing to look forward. He felt cut loose, drifting in a world he was constantly an outsider in. He'd tried to be a part of it, not by choice but those around him had done the trying for him. Changed him little by little, tethered him to the ground and made him stop and see the lives around him. So he'd ended up giving a damn. Sorrow isn't something new, but it never stops being fresh hurt when it's newly taken hold in his guts. Twisting the insides and giving him bitter memories to hang around for many years, lives and deaths to come.  
  
Gwen's beautiful, ripe with the new life growing inside her and yet he can't help but see nothing but ashes where she stands. Another one to die, not yet but soon as time will take her toll and glutton herself on the lives she runs through. Gwen will have her baby and drift away, Jack will see yet another child where he'll be the uncle until they realise they age and he don't. Till it starts to fester and breed in their eyes till he can't help but not see it.  
  
He won't go through it again. Not now. It's still too fresh, bleeding and corroded with anger that has nothing righteous about it. But is a selfish one. A desire to be left alone and not having to live up to expectations he never asked for. To stand on the outside again, to go back to skim across and dance on the edges rather than dip into their pathetic short lives and be given nothing but grief for it.  
  
He's unfair, an obvious fact but for now he's going to indulge in it and leave it all behind. He's aching for a quiet he won't get for many years yet, to be back to when the glittery surface was all he saw apart from when he visited its' gutters for a romp or two.  
  
So he doesn't hug her, because feeling her against him smelling like what once meant comfort might lure him back again. He has plans, and all of them are to never stop, to just keep moving till the worst of the feelings have been burnt away by others and dulled by time. Till he can sleep again without looking for Ianto's heartbeat, without feeling the holes left by Tosh and Owen and the lack of having a ragtag family around him. Wondering whether Gwen will ever stop looking at him like he was a puzzle for her to solve, a hero - someone she'd follow to hell and back and yet never stop questioning. Also never stop loving. But right now the care he sees in her eyes is just one more incentive to press the button and leave this cemetery. It'll be like the blink of an eye for Jack, and easier to grieve them all now rather than wait it out for another few years. They're so short on time, and they grow shorter with every decade he grows older. Further and further apart from everyone else, there's only one direction this can go in. So he swallows the pain and the words, looks his fill for one last time and tries to find obliteration of what was, in the quiet waiting for what's to come next.


End file.
